William Hague

…is the new British Foreign Secretary. He is an Oxford man, balding, and of course, pithy. As leader of the Conservative Party in Britain during Tony Blair’s first term, he struggled to bridge his party’s ideological divides and was trounced by Blair as a candidate for prime minister in 2001. More recently he has adapted himself to David Cameron’s rhetorical and policy programs aimed at reviving the Conservatives as an electable expression of Britain’s center-right. Earlier this week, his party inked an agreement to form a coalition government with the Liberal Democrats—the first coalition to govern Britain since the Second World War.

On Friday, the British Embassy in Washington invited a dozen or more foreign policy journalists to meet Hague for a “roundtable” talk. To maintain its brand position, the embassy scheduled the meeting at teatime and served finger sandwiches.

The Foreign Secretary began by describing the negotiations that had produced his government’s coalitions—talks in which he had played a leading role. He had a pat phrase to describe the alliance that I’m not quite sure I wrote down correctly, since the witticisms are interchangeable—the government was an alignment of “socially liberal conservatives and economically conservative liberals,” or some such mash. The most interesting aspect of the agreement is an attempt to lock in the coalition for a full five-year term through the promotion of what Hague described as a “constitutional innovation.” To avoid the constant overhang of a collapsed government if one of the coalition parties becomes unhappy, the two leaderships agreed to name the date of the next British election as the first Thursday in May, 2015, and they agreed to attempt to pass legislation that would require a supermajority to move the election up.

On foreign policy, it was fascinating to listen to the Foreign Secretary tic through the usual issue sets—Iran, Afghanistan, Europe, global development, humanitarian intervention, etc.—and to discover that there is hardly any distance between his coalition’s views and that of the Labour government it is succeeding. I’ll save Hague’s comments about Afghan policy until next week, after a reported article I’ve been working on for the magazine, in which British policy figures, has appeared. But on the Afghan war and every other subject discussed, except perhaps for the European economic crisis, where Hague emphasizes Britain’s skepticism about the euro monetary project, it was striking how centrist and even center-left orthodoxy has replaced the radicalism of the Thatcher years and the subsequent “wet-dry” debates among British conservatives. I used to hold in my mind the truism that continental European conservative parties roughly equate to our Democratic Party in their foreign policy views, but that British foreign policy conservatism was an exception; no longer, it seems.

Hague pointed out that, in opposition, his party had supported every one of Tony Blair’s major military interventions abroad, whether they were motivated entirely by humanitarianism or by more traditional security arguments—in Sierra Leone, in Kosovo, in Bosnia, in Afghanistan, and in Iraq. (The Liberal Democrats, his coalition partners, were the only British political party to oppose the Iraq invasion.)

Asked if Britain would now pull back from its instinct to intervene where possible in humanitarian crises in poor countries, Hague said, “Would we intervene if we thought another Rwanda was happening? Yes, we would. Would we intervene if we saw another Balkan war unfolding? Yes, we would.”

Asked to name a single arena of foreign policy in which his Conservative-led government disagreed with or had a new idea to offer the Obama Administration, Hague said he could currently think of none. To give proof, nonetheless, of his assertion that he intended the “special relationship” with the United States on his watch to be “solid but not slavish,” he cited an example of when he had found courage, as Shadow Foreign Secretary, to dissent from an important American policy. He mentioned a speech he had given some years ago in which he advocated, during the Bush Administration, for the closure of Guantánamo and the end of secret “rendition” flights to transport terrorist suspects outside of national systems of law. The theme of that speech, he recalled, was that the United States was in danger of losing its moral authority; Hague seemed to take some pride in the thought that by delivering it, as a Conservative, he had created space for the Labour government to start to move away from self-defeating Bush-era policies. If that is an absence of slavishness, the special relationship could certainly use more of it.

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